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WASHINGTON -- Sarah Susanka is standing in a tiny storage room in a tiny town house in this city's Georgetown neighborhood. Washer. Dryer. Paint cans. Paper bags. Suitcases. Boxes of Christmas decorations.
She seems right at home.
"There's a lot of things we can do here," she says, looking at the tiny but potentially functional space. "Really!"
Susanka, 48, is author of The Not So Big House series of books. Her newest offering is Inside the Not So Big House (Taunton Press, $34.95). Her four Not So Big titles have sold more than 1 million copies combined; a fifth, devoted to outside spaces, is coming in February.
She's an expert on how to do more with less. It's her way of life. Her mantra. She's comfortable in small spaces. In fact, she prefers them.
What Susanka's new book does is give homeowners ideas about how to make a small home feel more substantial than its square footage; how to give a house the personality of its owners; and how to do the most with what you have.
Easier said than done? Depends where you live.
She says owners of smaller homes in San Francisco, New York and Washington are traditionally savvier than the rest of the country when it comes to using spaces well. "Everywhere else, it's houses on steroids," she says. "At times, I feel people in America are living on two different planets."
The big-house people vs. the small-house people.
But recent real estate news that McMansions might be going out of style -- backed up by reports from the Census Bureau and the National Association of Home Builders that average house size is leveling off after three decades of steady growth -- is music to her ears.
"There's a segment of the population that believes ... bigness says they've arrived," Susanka says.
But many of those homeowners don't have a clue how they ended up in those houses with vast entryways, warehouse-size, granite-laden kitchens and four-car garages, she says.
"They're almost doing it on automatic," she says. They wind up with oversized homes, "but they don't know why."
And then there are the other people who know that size is really nothing more than, well, an ego trip.
"There's a different way of living without lots of possessions. ... Those people can articulate something about themselves that has nothing to do with bigness."
Susanka happily, gladly, falls in the latter category.
She's an architect by training; her obsession with smallness started when she was working for a firm in Minneapolis and clients began "wanting something much more focused on quality than quantity." Her first book came out in 1998, and the rest is history for her.
She believes the pendulum is swinging her way.
"I think people now are looking for smaller, quality homes," she says, "a comfortable place to live."
She says she isn't "trying to convince people to leave their big houses. People will seek it out (the small, quality home), but they have to want it."
And that comes with a population becoming "more sophisticated."
It shows up in everything from the "new urbanism" of planned close-in communities where walking is encouraged (the neighborhood "becomes part of the home") to Target stores whose designs have "raised the awareness of functionality." Scandinavians and the Japanese have happily lived this way for years, she says.
Susanka acknowledges that she's not talking cheap here.
"But what I'm trying to do is get away from the dullest square foot," she says, referring to the tendency toward vast spaces with no purpose. "You have to ask yourself, 'How livable is this space?'
"Everyone talks about quality, but it has to have integrity. Design is the whole package. What makes us feel whole?"
As for the tiny laundry area in this tiny town house, she suggests replacing the side-by-sides with a narrow stackable washer/dryer unit near the door to free up space, a counter on the left with storage below (where the dryer used to be) and cabinets up to the ceiling above with hopper doors that lift from the bottom. On the other wall would be a shallow cabinet with long doors and a pull-out counter for folding clothes.
"You want it to look cleaner," she says. "Don't you?"
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